The Global Visualization Process (GVP) constitutes a comprehensive software system for visualizing geospatial information. GVP may be used to display terrain, as well as cultural features, including buildings, landscaping, agriculture, events of tactical significance and virtually any other event, characteristic, attribute, or value that may be mapped into a two or three-dimensional geospatial domain. As a distributed, networked, and interactive display system for such data, GVP can be tailored to a number of applications in the general areas of training and simulation, command and control, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), and human factors research. U.S. Pat. No. 7,239,311, issued on Jul. 3, 2007 (the “'311 patent”) and U.S. Pat. No. 7,564,455 issued on Jul. 21, 2009 (the “'455 patent”), are both concerned with GVP and are incorporated herein by reference for background purposes as if fully set forth.
The task of incorporating massive amounts of data into a geospatial visualization system, from diverse geo-referenced source datasets presents significant challenges. Previous versions of GVP, as described in the '311 patent and the '455 patent, relied upon pre-existing third-party software to process and transform source data, comprising mainly imagery and elevation grids, into a format supporting GVP's real-time, 3-D display capability. A number of technical and performance related shortcomings were discovered with that third-party software. In one example, restrictions on supported file-formats proved unacceptable. With respect to performance, the third-party software was unable to provide sufficient speed and scalability to efficiently handle the massive datasets required. In addition, run-time computational costs of prior art systems in loading and displaying terrain, particularly regarding CPU loading, were high. There were often reliability problems with the software, artifacts and other quality concerns with the output, and a limited set of attributes that could be configured. The software was also locked to a single operating system, and was not easily modified to incorporate new datasets and data structures. Moreover, most prior art terrain generation/display systems assume that execution will take place on a single machine residing entirely in memory, and thus, do not provide an architecture amenable to distributed processing and efficient on-demand distribution of terrain data over a network. A client-server based solution would allow for distributed computing resources over an arbitrarily large number of computing nodes. For at least the foregoing reasons a new solution was needed to process and transform terrain source data into a format supporting its real-time, 3-D display capability. Embodiments of a terrain database builder according to the present invention are directed to solving at least the foregoing problems.